Anne Rice - Servant of the Bones

“Ah, then, when I say these words the Servant of the Bones will rise?”

“If you don’t believe it, why do you want it?” asked the old man.

The shock went through me. I was fully visible.

I cleaved to the wall, not daring even to try to see my own limbs. The cloth wound itself around me without a whisper. “Make the shoes to shine even brighter, give me the gold for my wrist, and make my face as clean of hair, yet give me the hair of my youth,” I asked silently.

I felt my full weight, denser perhaps than it had even been the night before. I wanted to look down at myself but I dared not make myself known.

“You don’t seriously think I believe in it,” Gregory replied politely. He folded the sheaf of papers and put them carefully into the breast of his coat.

The old man made no reply.

“I want to know about it, I want to know what she was talking about, I want it. I covet it. I covet it because it’s precious and it’s unique and she spoke of it with her dying words.”

“Yes, that does convey upon it an added value,” said the old man, his voice harder and clearer than I had ever heard it before.

I could feel my hair against my shoulders. I could feel the dampness from the concrete wall as it chilled my neck. I made the scarf at my neck thicker. I made it fit higher. The lightbulb stirred. Things creaked in the room, but neither man appeared to notice, so intent were they on the casket and on each other.

“The chains are rusted, aren’t they?” Gregory said, raising his right finger. “May I take them off?”

“Not here.”

“All right, then I presume we have concluded our bargain. But you want something else, don’t you? A final promise. I know. I can see it in you. Speak. I want to take home my treasure and open it. Speak. What more do you want?”

“Promise me, you will not come back to this house. You’ll never seek my company again. You’ll never seek the company of your brother. You will never tell anyone of how you were born one of us. You will keep your world away as you have always done. If your brother calls you, you will not receive his call. If your brother visits you, you will not receive him. Promise all of this to me.”

“You ask that of me every time I see you,” said Gregory. He laughed. “It’s always the final thing you ask, and I always promise.”

He cocked his head and smiled affectionately at the old man, patronizingly, with maddening impudence.

“You won’t see me again, Grandfather. Never, never again. When you die, I won’t cross the bridge to come to your graveside. Is that what you want to hear? I won’t come to Nathan to mourn with him. I won’t risk exposing him, or any of you. Very well?”

The old man nodded.

“But I have one last demand of you,” said Gregory, “if I am never to speak to or see Nathan again.”

The old man made a little questing gesture with both hands. “Tell my brother I love him. I insist you tell him.”

“I’ll tell him,” said the old man.

Then Gregory moved swiftly, gathering up the casket, letting the chains scrape on the desk as he stood upright with it in his arms.

I felt again the tremors, the strengthening, moving down my arms and my legs. I felt my fingers moving, I felt a tingling as if tiny needles were being touched to me all over. I didn’t like it, that it came from his touch. But maybe it came from all of us here, our sense of purpose, our concentration.

“Goodbye, Grandfather,” said Gregory. “Someday, you know, they will come to write about you—my biographers, those who tell the story of the Temple of the Mind.” He tightened his grip on the casket. The rusted chains left red dust on his lapels but he didn’t care. “They’ll write your epitaph because you are my grandfather. And you’ll deserve that recognition.”

“Get out of my house.”

“Of course, you needn’t worry for the moment. No record exists of the boy you mourned thirty years ago. On my deathbed I’ll tell them.”

The old man shook his head slowly, but resisted a reply.

“But tell me, aren’t you the least bit curious about this casket, about what’s in it, about what may happen when I read the incantations?”

“No.”

Gregory’s smile faded. He studied the old man, and then he said:

“All right, Grandfather. Then we have nothing to talk about, do we? Nothing at all.”

The old man nodded.

The anger beat in Gregory’s cheeks, wet and red. But he had no time for this. He looked at the thing in his arms and he turned and hurried out the door, kicking it open with his knee and letting it slam behind him.

The old man sat exactly as before. I think he looked at the dust on his desk. I think he stared at the flakes of rust from the iron which had been left on his polished wood. But I couldn’t tell.

I felt nothing. I neither moved nor was strengthened, as Gregory with his casket of bones moved away from me. No, he was not Master, never, never, by any means. But this old man? I had to know.

Gregory’s steps died away in the alley.

I came forward, and walked to the old man’s desk and stood in front of it.

The old man was aghast.

The moment for an outcry passed in rigid silence, his eyes contracting, and when he spoke it was a whisper.

“Go back to the bones, Spirit,” he said.

I drew on all my strength to hold out against him, I thought nothing of his hatred, and I thought of no moment in my long miserable existence when I had been either wronged or loved. I looked at him and I stood firm. I barely heard him.

“Why did you pass the bones to him?” I asked. “What is your purpose! If you called me up to destroy him, tell me!”

He turned his face away, so as not to see me.

“Be gone, Spirit!” he declared in Hebrew.

I watched him stand up and move the chair back out of his way, and I saw his hands fly up, and I knew that he was speaking Hebrew, and then the Chaldean, yes, he knew that too, and he spoke it with perfect cadence, but I didn’t hear the words. The words didn’t touch me.

“Why did you say he killed Esther? Why, Rebbe, tell me!”

Silence. He had ceased to speak. He didn’t even pray in his mind or his heart. He stood transfixed, his mouth closed tight beneath his white mustache, the locks of his hair shivering slightly, the light showing the yellowed hairs of his beard as well as the snow white.

His eyes were closed. He began to whisper his prayers in Hebrew, davening, or bowing, that is, very quickly over and over again.

His fear and fury were equal; his hatred outstripped them both.

“Do you want justice for her?” I shouted at him. But nothing would break his prayers and his closed eyes and his bowing.

Now I spoke, softly in Chaldean,

“Fly from me,” I said in a whisper, “all you tiny parts of land and air and mountain and sea, and of the living and of the dead, which have come to give me this form, fly from me but not so far that I cannot summon you at will, and leave me my shape that this mortal man may see me and be afraid.”

The light above shivered again on its raw cord. I saw the air move the old man’s beard. I saw it make him blink.

I looked down through my own translucent hands and saw the floor beyond them.

“Fly from me,” I whispered, “and stay close to me to return at my summons, that God Himself would not know me from a man that He had made!”

I vanished.

I threw out my disappearing hands to frighten him. I wanted so to hurt him, just a little. I wanted so to defy him. On and on he prayed with eyes closed.

But there was no time for idle play with him. I didn’t know if there was energy enough for what I meant to do.

Passing through the walls I went upwards, rising over the rooftops, passing through tingling wires, and into the cool air of the night.